UNPACU PUBLICLY DENOUNCES THE CUBAN REGIME BEFORE THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT

Madrid, November 21, 2018.

The Unión Patriótica de Cuba [Patriotic Union of Cuba] (UNPACU), together with a large group of eminent attorneys in international law specializing in proceedings before the International Criminal Court, led by the President of the International Criminal Lawyers Association (BPI-ICB-CAPI), Blas Jesús Imbroda, has launched a process to present in the coming months various accusations of the Cuban regime before said Court.

The axes of accusations will be crimes against humanity that the Court can judge, both for countries parties to the Court (signatories of the Rome Statute) and for those that are not, as is the case of Cuba. In Latin America there are only two countries that are not a party to the Criminal Court, Nicaragua and Cuba, and 28 states parties. At the international level, 121 states are party.

The success of any of the axes of accusation will result in the order of international detention for those members of the regime considered responsible from July 2002 until the date of the last crime subject to denunciation; i.e. at least until November 2018. This international arrest warrant would prevent any of the sentenced, with the certainty of being arrested, from stepping on the grounds of any country party to the International Criminal Court (121 states, 28 of them in the Americas).

The axes of complaint are 3:

- Crimes against humanity committed by Cuba against Cuban citizens, through denunciation before the UN

Security Council. - Crimes against humanity committed by Cuba against Cuban citizens in the territories of states that are a party to the International Criminal Court, also directly before the Office of the Prosecutor of the Court.

UNPACU launched a campaign of contacts with the states parties to the Criminal Court in whose territories the Cuban government has committed such crimes against its own citizens, to broad the accusation axes and get their participation in them.

Crimes against humanity that UNPACU has collected for complaints

The crimes that the International Criminal Court (ICC) can judge in its courts are restricted, by definition, to those criminal offenses defined in the Rome Statute and that have been committed since the start of the ICC (July 1, 2002) to the present. Even with this limitation, the documentary work of UNPACU has collected thousands of cases that offer a definition of the action of the Government of Cuba as "systematic".

The battery of cases of crimes against humanity that have been collected are contained in the following sections of the Rome Statute:

- Art. 7a) Murder: 244 cases from July 2012 to date. - Art. 7c) Slavery: in line with the thoughtful statements by Latin American leaders on the conditions of slavery in which the Cuban government provides doctors and professionals to other countries. There are 65,000 Cuban professionals on foreign missions, many of whom work in States that are a party to the ICC. - - Art. 7d) Deportation or forced transfer of population: UNPACU has distinguished two groups of cases. On the one hand, hundreds of intra-national deportations based on the fact that in Cuba the capacity to change residence by law is totally restricted (Decree No. 217 of 1997). On the other hand, forced expatriations, both of members of service missions (doctors, among others), and of dissidents who have been deported abroad. In both cases UNPACU has thousands of documented cases. It is worth mentioning, for example, the case of the 350 prisoners and relatives who were deported in 2010 and cannot return to the island. - Art. 7e) Incarceration or other serious deprivation of physical liberty: UNPACU has collected more than 54,000 arbitrary detentions documented between 2010 and November 2018, in addition to the more than 500 cases of political prisoners registered on the island for the same dates.

Furthermore, there is a much larger group not on public census, as are all those arbitrarily convicted of pre-criminal social danger, by which people are condemned who have not committed a crime even in a tentative degree, but presumably that they could commit a crime based on the criteria of the Police, the State Security, or the judges, which represent many thousands of cases. - Art. 7f) Torture: UNPACU has more than 500 documented cases in this regard, both in prisons and in detention centers. - Art. 7h) Persecution of a group or community with its own identity based on political motives - Art. 7i) Forced Disappearance of Persons: UNPACU has collected thousands of cases. - Art. 7k) Other inhumane acts: various.

Acknowledgements Other organizations of the most reliable seriousness have collaborated in this work. One that has stood out for its involvement in this process has been CubaArchive.org, which has worked hand in hand with the legal team and UNPACU to detail the cases mentioned in several sections of the complaint.

Other organizations, whose data have been key to learn of cases and their legal justification, include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and CCDHRN (FIDH), among others.

ABOUT UNPACU

The Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) is the most numerous and active non-violent political activism organization in Cuba. It has more than 3,000 activists in 122 cells with 25 locations throughout the country.

It was created on August 24, 2011 by José Daniel Ferrer García, a former political prisoner of the Group of 75 who refused to be deported / expatriated to obtain his freedom and the regime was forced to release him on the island with an extrapenal license that would allow them the possibility of returning him to prison. Along with José Daniel, only 12 people formed UNPACU at the time of its creation, but since then its growth has been exponential.

At present UNPACU has 53 political prisoners on the island and more than 230 members of the organization have already been in prison. The activism of UNPACU is based on non-violent resistance and disobedience; the same principle on which the so-called "colored" revolutions have been based, whose axes of action were once enunciated by Gene Sharp.

UNPACU, in addition, has official representation both in the US and in the European Union.

All the contents of the Press Conference that took place in the Madrid Press Association can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cnKRutA7zjAHTAPXiLqzsh3H9uO3s55A

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT THE PATRIOTIC UNION OF CUBA (UNPACU) AT:

If men are not kept straight by duty, they must be by fear. The more they are kept by fear, the less they are free. The greater the strength of duty, the greater the Liberty.

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

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